This chapter focuses on the diagonalization of a set of commuting scattering operators, or equivalently, transfer matrices, in models involving higher-rank symmetries. The discussion centers on modules more intricate than those of [N – M, M] type, ultimately considering arbitrary irreducible representations of the symmetric group. The core idea is to construct a suitable basis in the representation space that enables the reduction of a higher-dimensional diagonalization problem to a sequence of lower-dimensional ones that are already solved. This reduction is achieved through a recursive scheme in which each step lowers the matrix dimension, enabling its diagonalization–a procedure known as nested Bethe ansatz. The method is framed as a successive dimensional reduction, systematically building on solutions from simpler cases. Special attention is given to Yang’s connection formula and its role in enabling this recursive approach. The chapter extends the framework introduced in Chapter 3, developing a coordinate version of the nested Bethe ansatz and generalizing it to accommodate multiple levels of nesting. This recursive structure reveals deep algebraic insights and plays a pivotal role in the study of integrable systems with rich internal symmetries.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

This chapter looks at the poetic herbarium through the concept of vegetal ontology, addressing works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and especially Emily Dickinson. The epistolary herbaria is a collaborative affair; “a flower in a letter,” like the tendencies of the plants themselves, seeded itself among various writers from across national frontiers. Not only were the form and the content of the messages vegetal but so also was the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds or spores, preceded by lovingly tending to, gathering and preserving flowers. In her work, Dickinson restages the elemental and cosmic clash of viriditas – “greenness,” or the self-refreshing power of finite existence that reaches its apotheosis in plants – and ariditas – “dryness,” or the scorching heat of sin understood in the extra-moral sense of everything that contravenes life and its renewal. Dickinson’s approach is at the same time allegorical and literal, plants providing her with a way of dealing with the inexorability of death. Analogous practices and preferences, like genres and authors, developed across nationalities, geographies, and time periods.

The modern nation of Papua New Guinea is a colonial construct where English and its pidgin-creole daughter language, Tok Pisin, share an intertwined history and contemporary linguistic ecology, each with its official and unofficial roles and each influencing the other. Today at least half of all Papua New Guineans use Tok Pisin and/or English for day-to-day communication in this country with more than 840 distinct languages. Tok Pisin is the dominant medium of oral and informal communication, even as English remains the dominant medium of written and formal communication. The morphology and syntax of Tok Pisin show characteristics that are typical for the languages of its first speakers. Its lexicon is mainly English, but high-frequency words of German, Kuanua, and Chinese Pidgin origin are indicative of a complicated history. Papua New Guinea English has been heavily influenced by Tok Pisin.

In process theories the crucial thing is what the brain does, not how it is doing it, i.e. the specific architecture of the brain is not crucial. Causal structure theories propose just the opposite. For example, the recurrent processing theory (RPT) and the integrated information theory (IIT) propose both that systems with feedforward processing are not conscious but also that all sorts of systems with recurrent processing (even very simple ones) are conscious. We will also introduce the ‘unfolding argument’ which holds that causal structure theories may be incompatible with the scientific method.

In this chapter, I ask us to consider raciosemiotics – a way of examining signification, or semiosis (producing meaning through signs), that rigorously attends to bodies, feelings, histories – as means for testifying to Black life and death. I offer a raciosemiotics framework as one way to bear witness, or testify, to practices of making meaning through and about Blackness that either hinder or sustain Black life. I cast raciosemiotics to capture past and future work that centers meaning making about and through racialized signs (including the racialized body) and I imagine it as a possible tool in an abolitionist linguistic anthropology, following Savannah Shange’s offerings. The second half of the chapter applies a raciosemiotic lens to testify to multimodal practices that mete out “discursive-material” harm; and a collective practice of publicly censuring acts that threaten Black life and living (i.e., naming whiteness). In this discussion, I also briefly attend to everyday practices of Black expression that refuse or disregard anti-Black epistemes.

What are the characteristics of consciousness? How long does a conscious percept last? Are animals conscious? We review the research related to these and many other questions and discuss how the answers to these questions can help us to judge the merit of different theories of consciousness. For example, a theory that predicts that consciousness occurs only after several hundred milliseconds after stimulus onset, would be falsified if consciousness were to occur earlier than that. We will see that most theories of consciousness make very few precise predictions about such matters.

Chapter 5, “Envisioning a Plurinational Governance”, analyzes the role and aspirations of Indigenous peoples in the international governance of the Amazon. Based on the analysis of COICA international politics and ACTO strategies and actions regarding Indigenous peoples, the Chapter argues that the international governance of the Amazon has excluded Indigenous peoples by recognizing a limited version of self-determination with no political rights. Many ACTO officials reject the possibility of having the representativeness of Indigenous peoples in the deliberative processes of the organization. However, the continued indigenous activism has opened new opportunities for institutionalizing their participation within ACTO. Despite ACTO’s political weakness and the different institutional challenges of COICA, Indigenous peoples struggle to decolonize the international governance of the Amazon and enact what would be a plurinational international governance.

Government contracts, which could be lucrative, were always a matter of public interest. As a result, competitive bidding was used to ensure transparency, fairness, and accessibility to a wide number of potential contractors. This system was not always conducive to producing the best and most effective product, especially in the case of aircraft and engines that had a rapid obsolescence rate. In addition, the General Staff, which controlled the purse strings for the Air Corps, had a major role in deciding which aircraft would be purchased and for what missions they would be used. The problems with this system were illustrated by the Boeing XB-17 prototype that promised a dramatic increase in performance: it was faster than any pursuit aircraft while also carrying over two tons of bombs for 2,000 miles. But when it crashed during performance trials due to pilot error, the General Staff refused to buy the revolutionary bomber and instead insisted on purchasing hundreds of less capable, but cheaper, medium bombers. Airmen who protested this decision were punished with demotion and exile.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

This chapter surveys the history of China from the time of first contact with British traders in the early seventeenth century until the present. It traces the story of English through the era of pidgin English, to English language education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and recent policies in the People’s Republic of China. Since the opening of China in the late 1970s, English has been officially promoted as a key to modernisation. Today, official attitudes to the language seem to be less enthusiastic than the recent past, but, despite this, the popularity of learning English appears to be undiminished among China’s growing middle classes.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.

This chapter focuses on how Pater looked at the natural world and art. It discusses how he practiced and thought about the very act of looking. For him, this was both an acutely personal act, and something demanding recognition that the object being looked at has its own specificity – material, historical, and contextual. This chapter asks what qualities he retained as visual touchstones across the broad historical timespan, from the Greeks to the present day, that he addressed; and through the variety of different modes in which he captured the objects of sight – essays, reviews, fiction, and imaginary ‘portraits’ of figures from the past. It shows that all are unified by Pater’s habits of looking, including how he saw colour, and by the process of translation into verbal language, with attention to works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and Marius the Epicurean.

With today’s global media attention on climate crises and resource-centered violence, scholars are keenly invested in understanding how we have reached such a dire situation and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to improve it. With Britain one of the first among the most powerful, assertive, and technologically advanced nations to develop a culture relying on self-worth defined by bourgeois affluence, the Victorian era marks the crucial historical period from which arose our current inability to act decisively as a collective in the face of global environmental destruction. But it also began the first local environmentalist groups, offered literature directly contesting environmental degradation, and created legal legislation regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by Indigenous author Kahgegagahbowh (aka George Copway), from the colony of Upper Canada, many who did not identify as British contributed to the shaping of the Victorian Age and its ecological zeitgeist.